First to note, the upload bandwidth (1) has nothing to do with the (2) download bandwidth people need to watch it on most services like UStream.

As a producer, you upload to UStream via your (1) connection to the web and UStream streams it out to everyone via (2) the connection from their server farm(s) to the individual computers people are watching the stream on.

This is mostly limited by the viewers connection to the internet – so people with lower bandwidth connections just see a lower quality version of the video (e.g. lower frames per second, lower resolution).

For this event we used the Standard HD Quality 16:9 – 960×540 @ 30fps, 650kbps, AAC 44.1k Stereo setting in UStream Producer Pro. I’ve listed all the options Producer Pro offers below, so you can get an idea about alternate bandwidths.

Whatever setup you use, a good rule of thumb is to have enough upload bandwith to handle twice the amount of the average data rate.

Also, the only way to monitor when the stream is up is to have someone watch and listen to it. So you are gonna need bandwidth for that. Usually this will adjust itself to the bandwidth available and you can use a very low bandwidth viewing stream to make sure everything is working OK.

Here are three session examples. I’ve included a few data points for each that give a good idea of the real world requirements. They are:

Flash Video FLV File Size:

UStream allows you to download a Flash Video FLV file of anything you session you record to the server when you are logged into your account. This size is what exactly was required to upload this video to UStream.

You can view FLV’s like these via VLC player pretty easily if you wanna see the quality outside of the browser of what UStream captured to their server.

Length of each session

Data rates of bandwidth required to broadcast each video in kbps (kilobits per second), KBps (kilobytes per second), MBps (megabytes per second), mbps (megabits per second) of bandwidth

I’m not a network guy, so I always get confused by MBps vs. mbps conversions.

I “think” I know enough to say they are different and that I’ve calculated these correctly.

So it takes roughly a continuous 0.81 mbps connection to broadcast video of this quality via UStream. Doubling that to account for bursts means you should have a connection of roughly 1.5-1.6 mbps for an HD stream.

Doubling back through the UStream producer pro settings below, you should be able to calculate rough rates for whaterver quality of stream you want to produce.

UStream Producer Pro Settings

There are several settings you can select in UStream Producer Pro. They are: